best archival dvd media?

[lordsmurf]

MCC, PRODISC are two for sure,
and I believe MXL is too... would have to verify

[archaeo]

Verbatim is another, but I'm not sure if they make their own discs.

One interesting note from the study was of the effects of direct light, UV. It said that a disc could fail under exposure to sunlight in as little as a few weeks.

[koolaidwa]

hmm, well thanks lordsmurf, do u know what ones if any use organic dye then?

[lordsmurf]

TY uses it's own organics, Ritek is organics.

Those "light colored" discs (like Princo) are almost always a variation of cyanine (phthylocyanine ... however you spell it).

[handyguy]

Beall's have a gov test of 100 years.....Of course, you'd have to find out if they work on your writer. Whether there be dvd players in 100 years is another matter.

[lordsmurf]

I thought the gov't backed off that claim pretty quickly. It was never all that highly regarded, and very often was just a "BeAll" brandname using another media ID.

[cyflyer]

If the shelf life of our DVD-R's was really about 10 years, would any of us go to all trouble and expense we go through, just for a miserable 10 years ? I certainly would not, and I'd be really pissed off if they only lasted that time.

[DaveS]

If the shelf life of our DVD-R's was really about 10 years, would any of us go to all trouble and expense we go through, just for a miserable 10 years ? I certainly would not, and I'd be really pissed off if they only lasted that time.

yes, well at least I would b/c it's 10 more years than I have now, esp. for analog tapes. And, in 10 years, we'll all be on this forum talking about how to move blu ray disks to the next thing...this stuff will likely last more than 10 years, but for now, this is what is available...the govt and everyone else (corp.) is just trying to figure out this stuff as well, esp. as more and more media is 'born digital'

[archaeo]

the govt and everyone else (corp.) is just trying to figure out this stuff as well, esp. as more and more media is 'born digital'

That's right. The sheer volume of digitally generated data has quickly overwhelmed many organizations, especially the feds. Many organizations are now facing increasing regulatory pressure to comply with federal mandates for email, medical, insurance, legal, financial and government classified data. Up to now, employees had been sticking data willy nilly onto CD's for years, any CD's, without really knowing how stable they would be, archivally speaking. This drives the archivists crazy, and archivists are a picky group. They want to be able to verify that a particular medium will last a certain number of years, and they like to point to controlled studies that will quantify that. The archival qualities of CD's have finally been documented and standards defined, just as DVD's came onto the commercial market. Now they're racing to verify standards for DVD5, then DL, blu-ray etc, etc.

[koolaidwa]

well within 10 years something new will come along, we all will buy that and tranfers data/video whatever to that format/media

lol

[mil]

http://millenniata.com/ has a 1000 year disc that has come out. It's worth a shot to look at them.